Numlock Sunday: Manny Fidel on relentless curiosity and why Dasani tastes like that
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to my friend Manny Fidel, one of the hosts of
, a podcast which launched last year and has soared in popularity to my utter delight. It’s a great show, the crew has made appearances on other programs that you might have heard of including , and I wanted to have Manny back on again now that the show has actually launched.We spoke about topics including why Dasani tastes like that, why the TSA is still unpleasant, and why people used to look older.
Manny can be found at NoSuchThing.show, there’s a ton of overlap in Numlock and No Such Thing consumers, so do check it out:
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Manny, thank you so much for coming on, man. You are one of the triumvirate of people who host a very, very good podcast that I like called “No Such Thing.” So it is very good to have you on.
Yeah, always a pleasure.
The last time that we talked, it was right before you guys actually launched the show. Now you’re several months in, and I feel like you’ve had a really great run so far, in terms of what you’re trying to attack. Do you wanna talk a little bit about some of the stuff that you’re proud of and where you’re at now?
Yeah, we’re honestly super grateful, but also surprised at the reaction to the show. We thought it would take a year, maybe two years, for us to get and find an audience. But we’ve got a decent-sized audience now. We’re surprised that people like to hear us talk. At the beginning of our production trajectory, we thought about keeping the chatty part of the podcast to a minimum and having the expert and the takeaway segments be the main parts of the show. But it turns out people like hearing us yap about whatever nonsense the episode is about.
Yeah, we’ve been having a lot of fun. Most recently, we’ve done episodes about why people in the past used to look older than they do today. We’ve done episodes about why Dasani water doesn’t taste as good as the other waters. We’ve done episodes about the argument for using the pullout method as a method of contraception, which was a fun one that we got a lot of reactions to. Yeah, man, every next episode just feels so different than the last one, but we’re just having such a blast with it.
Yeah, again, you just attack these questions with just such a delightful curiosity that I’m having a great time as a listener. I feel like I have sent your show to more people off the cuff, being like, “Oh, you should listen to this episode about is it okay to wear clothes on your bed.” Because these are fights that I’ve had with people.
Yeah first few episodes I think really were birthed out of like arguments that I had with Devan and Noah; we were treating the show as a way to like prove ourselves right. But now we’ve moved a little bit beyond the arguments and moved into questions that we find really interesting, questions that we get all the time, questions that are not super easy to just Google the answer and requires our journalism skills, the skills that we’ve learned in media for the past 10 years to get to the bottom of.
It’s been really, really great to listen to. I think that your show takes nothing for granted, which is nice. One of my favorite episodes that you’ve done (and I’ll throw it to you to talk a little bit about it), you had a podcast episode in April called “Why Are TSA Rules So Confusing?” And the minute that I saw that pop up in my feed, I was like, “Yes, why are they?” Like, why are shoes off, my laptop in bag, why is somebody yelling at me? Like, why?
Yeah, some of the episodes are born out of pure curiosity and some of them are born out of me being pissed off at the airport and being like, “No, I gotta figure out what the hell this is about.” Yeah, I’ve just had just like unlimited experiences or countless experiences of being yelled at to take my laptop out. Or when I do take my laptop out, getting yelled at that I didn’t need to take my laptop out. It seems to be different experiences at different airports, but it all boils down to these really weird practices and behaviors at the TSA.
So what’s driving that stuff?
There are a few different factors. I think the main one really is that TSA is not incentivized to be a good customer service organization. It’s a federal thing; nothing’s gonna happen if we write complaints about them. There’s no real reason to make us comfortable. They are just trying to get as many people through their system as efficiently as possible. But there are a ton of other reasons why TSA has these different rules in different places, and I would encourage your readers to go check out the episode for the full picture of that.
Yeah, it’s such a nuanced idea, too. I remember I entered the episode being like, “Yeah, TSA, why are they doing this? These guys are just making people’s lives in the aggregate miserable.” And by the end of it, I came away with a respect for the quandary that they’re in. Nobody wants to be the guy who changes a rule that causes a terrorist attack.
Yeah, exactly. But even the rules they have currently are not very effective. There’s always a study that is cited, at least once a year, that like 80% of weapons got through TSA on these practice runs. And it’s like, “Alright, well, we’re doing all this supposedly for safety, but it seems like we’re not really as safe as we think.”
The show, what I love about it is the extent of the range. Obviously, you cover how do we adequately protect the air travel system in the United States of America? But you address why Dasani tastes like that?
Yeah, yes, exactly. This one was born out of a debate we’ve been having for years. I’ve never really been able to taste the differences in water, but Devan and Noah feel very passionate about the fact that Dasani is just so bad compared to Poland Spring, for example. Now I have found out through the reporting of this episode why I haven’t been able to taste the difference. It’s because I’m always drinking water when it’s very cold.
We talked to the famous water sommelier, and he told us that if you’re drinking water cold, it’s really gonna be hard for you to tell the differences in the taste. The coldness of the water is so abrasive that you’re not really thinking about the minerals or the creaminess of the water underneath the temperature. But that one’s a really fun one. At the end, we did a blind water taste test to stress test whether Devan and Noah actually can taste the differences between water, and the result is pretty funny.
Again, no issue is too small. It’s very much like a fun part of this. I enjoy how much of your work on the podcast is you guys just being very interested in, like, what animals are actually feeling about stuff. One of my favorite episodes from the very early ones was whether horses actually hate running, which is based on the observation (from I believe, Noah) that he never sees horses just running on their own in a field when he drives past them.
Yeah, it was Devan who pointed that out in his New Jersey slightly country-er area.
And then also the fundamental question of are suburban dogs happier than city dogs?
Mm-hmm, yeah. It’s funny, over a year ago, when “Search Engine” hadn’t launched yet, they were doing a call out for episode ideas, and we pitched to them, being like, “Here are our ideas, but also, will you let us just do one of the episodes?” That’s how their episode about the prominence of chicken bones on the streets of New York came about. But the original episode we pitched to them was the horse episode: do horses hate running? And it ended up being too similar to an episode they were already doing, which was: Are monkeys at the zoo sad? And so, I love that there’s like a niche form of content figuring out what animals are feeling like in different scenarios.
Yes, it is an exciting moment to be an animal psychologist with an SM7 microphone. There were a few other really good ones.
The one that I did want to talk to you a little bit about (that I thought was a fascinating episode) was why people used to look older. I think it is somewhat, a phenomenon that all of us have appreciated in one way or another. You look at a photograph and you’re like, “Man, these folks look ancient,” and they were all 23. What was going on?
Yeah, we’ve been hearing about this for years now. It goes viral once a year, where there’s some tweet that’s like, “This man invented this product at only age 17, but he looks like he’s in his 40s.” And we thought to do this episode because I myself have even seen old college football tapes. I’m a huge college football fan. I would see these old games on ESPN or whatever. And these guys are 18, 19, 20 years old, and they just look like they’ve got their 401k set up, big mustaches, they must be on their third or fourth kid. They just look really old.
So we talked to a plastic surgeon, and (like all of the episodes) the answer is very layered and there are a lot of different factors. But basically, it’s a mix between actual, tangible things that we’re doing to our skin today that they weren’t necessarily doing back then. It’s about quality of life. The quality of life was worse back then. They just started looking older because they weren’t as healthy.
A lot of it, too, is psychology. There’s a famous photo of the Cheers cast. It’s like from the first season, and they’re all in their 30s, but they all look like they’re in their 50s. Our brains could be playing tricks on us. They’re all wearing really old styles, really old-fashioned clothes, old-fashioned haircuts. And that dates them more so than their skin. It could be the case that if we all dressed like that for a photo shoot, we might look older than we actually are.
Exciting. I mean, it is all a matter of perspective on that front. And also in fairness, the skincare that we are doing is just not secondhand smoking at a restaurant.
Exactly. There are rules put in place in our society today that actually help us look younger. And I run into this all the time. I’m 33 years old, but I’m still getting aggressively carded everywhere I go just because I have a baby face. And so that was a part of the episode as well.
Hey man, good for you. Again, I really dig the show. And I was so excited to have you back on. When we talked, it was just at launch, and it was so much about the potential of the thing. And now having it come out and just seeing this really great audience get built up and this really recurring listenership. And you guys are appearing on excellent shows. It’s been really fun to watch. And I guess I will just throw you a last question: what else are you guys looking forward to? What can people expect from the show going into the second half of the year?
Yeah, we’re definitely looking to grow. We’ve got a budget now, which is a lot of fun. And we’re just looking forward to the future for sure.
We’re also looking at potentially doing some Patreon stuff, some extra content. Again, we’re really surprised that people actually like to listen to us regardless of what we’re talking about. That’s been really surreal. So we’re trying to figure out how to capitalize on that.
We’re stoked. And we also need to thank you because we are still getting people subscribing to our show today from your newsletter. Anytime someone subscribes, it tells us that it came from your newsletter. And so we love that we have that overlap here in the audience.
Dude, of course. I think that lots of people just wanna learn about cool things going on in the world. Where can folks find you, and where can they find the show?
So you can go to nosuchthing.show. That’s gonna take you to our sub stack. From there, you can find our show anywhere you listen to your podcasts: that’s Spotify, that’s Apple Podcasts, that’s Pocket Casts, which I’m learning as a thing. We’ve got a lot of requests from people to get on Pocket Casts. I’ve never heard of it, but there are a lot of people on there. So, shout out to them. Yeah, but mostly if you go to nosuchthing.show, you should be able to find everything there.
Awesome. Well, hey, I hope folks check it out. Thanks again for your time.
Yeah, thank you.
Edited by Crystal Wang
If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.
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